Workingmen's

Workingmen's

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Fraternity & Fecundity as not so Fraternizing

Excerpt from Carlos Bulosan's (1946) America is in the Heart:

            (24) "The unorganized revolt in the southern province ended in tragedy; the peasants were shot down and those who survived were throw into medieval dungeons. But these conditions could not go on for long without disastrously rocking the very foundation of Philippine life. These sporadic revolts and uprisings unquestionably indicated the malignant cancer that was eating away the nation's future security and negativity influencing the growth of the Philippines from a backward and undeveloped agricultural land into a gigantic industrial country. The wealth that was not already in the power of the large corporations, banks, and the church was beginning to flow into the vaults of new corporations, banks, and other groups. As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies, as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.
                    "But some were favored by this sudden upsurge of industry. The sons of the professional classes studied law and went to the provinces, victimizing their own people and enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. In a few years these lawyers were elected to the national government, and once secure in their positions and connections, they also took part in the merciless exploitation of the peasantry and a new class of dispossessed peasants who were working in the factories or on the vast haciendas.
                   "These conditions could not continue forever. In every house and hut in the far-flung barrios where the common man or tao was dehumanized by absentee landlordism, where a peasant had a son who went to school through the sacrifice of his family and who came back with invigorating ideas of social equality and of equal justice before the law, there grew a great conflict that threatened to plunge the Philippines into one of its bloodiest revolutions" (Bulosan 24).

Critical Questions & Reading
1. If natal alienation entails that one can neither inherit from one's immediate ancestors nor bequeath anything to one's descendants, then who is left out of the patrilineal processes of political representation?
2. The doctrine of partus sequitut ventrem- "the offspring follows the condition of the mother"- or- "follows the belly the womb"- applied only to slaves and assured that the one thing that could be legitimately passed down from generation to generation among slaves was their status as slaves. Since the conduit of the chaining together of generations as slaves was the slave woman's body itself, what kinds of cognitive, psychological, and sexually un-gendering  dispossessions are taken for granted?

                  Fraternity is fraternity is fraternity: "it names a relation between brothers, men who share a common father. It refers to a heritage that has excluded at least half of humanity from the social, political and economic rights of brothers (Derrida 2005). What is the relation between fraternity and fecundity? Where is the sister among the brothers? Moreover, there are three basic questions that any economic system must answer to begin operation/ exploitation: (1) What will be produced? (2) By whom will it be produced, (3) For whom will we produce? With this sense, the reproduction of the state of the mother entails processes of asymmetrical laboring that falls at the feet of females who will be dispossessed as laboring units, who will reproductively labor as substitutable and fungible subjectees for the benefit and upward mobility of the brother.

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